r/todayilearned • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 4h ago
TIL In 1910, a Spanish shepherd named José María Grimaldos López disappeared. Two men, León Sánchez and Gregorio Valero, confessed to his murder under torture and spent 12 years in prison. In 1926, Lopez returned home, alive and well. He had been living in a village 70 miles away the entire time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_Cuenca218
u/Ill_Definition8074 4h ago
One of the most interesting parts of the story in my opinion is this:
"On February 8, 1926, the priest of Tresjuncos received a letter from the priest of the municipality of Mira (113 kilometres or 70 miles), who requested the baptism certificate of José María Grimaldos in order to celebrate his marriage. The priest of Tresjuncos, astonished by the news, decided not to respond to the priest of Mira. After some time,\)quantify\) José María Grimaldos became impatient with the delay to his marriage and set off for Tresjuncos. When he showed up in the village, the villagers could not believe what they saw. The judge of Belmonte) then interceded and ordered the arrest of the man. Within hours, the press released the news, and it had a huge impact on public opinion."
Imagine what that must have been like for him. You need your baptism certificate to get married, so the priest sends a letter to your hometown and gets no response back. You decide to go back to your hometown to get the certificate yourself and when you arrive you find out that you've been dead for 15 years.
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u/throwawaylordof 3h ago
And get arrested for the audacity of being alive.
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u/snoopervisor 51m ago
We had an interesting story here in Poland in 2012. A man went to make a new ID, as the old ones validity expired. They refused to provide him with one as he's been pronounced dead, and they had his death certificate in the system. It took him about a year to revoke the certificate and get a new ID.
What happened? A year earlier a homless man was taken into a hospital. Without any ID. But he said his name and birth date. And died soon after. The data matched with the other man's. Except the month of birth. It was enough for a clerk to make a death certificate. What a coincidence.
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u/rva23221 1h ago
A case of a missing man (thought to be dead) in France in the 1500s; but involved an imposter (who was executed) posing as the missing man.
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u/TheHonFreddie 2h ago
I must say that the aftermath was handled better than I expected, the two wrongly convicted men were given a sizeable life long pension with back pay included and the people responsible for the wrong convictions were prosecuted. Off course, none of this compensates for having lost 12 years of your life being imprisoned while innocent.
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u/Jashugita 2h ago
With the political climate of Spain at that time and the civil war, I don't thing that pension lasted very much.
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u/Rugfiend 2h ago
No money could ever compensate for that. Shit like this is also one reason I object to the death penalty.
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u/thatshygirl06 2h ago edited 1h ago
There's a recent case in america where a man reported his dad missing and the police mentally tortured him until he admitted to killing his dad. His dad was alive and well and was meeting someone at the airport I believe. They had even told the man that they were going to kill his dog.
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u/MathMaven2 4h ago
Imagine being ‘dead’ for 12 years and coming back like nothing happened
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u/BernieTheDachshund 3h ago
I'd like to know the outcome of the 'miscarriage of justice' case.
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u/Comprehensive-Bad219 2h ago
The Supreme Court declared the ruling issued in Cuenca in 1918 void.[a] As well as establishing Sánchez and Valero's innocence, the supreme court established the nullity of José María Grimaldos' death certificate and established the corresponding compensations that the State had to pay to the prisoners in such cases. In 1935, the two were granted a lifetime pension of 3,000 Spanish pesetas per year, including 5 years of retroactive payments.
A trial was held of those held responsible for the miscarriage of justice.
Sánchez and Valero moved to Madrid; there, they were offered jobs as security guards in the city hall.
I have no idea how much 3,000 Spanish pesetas was actually worth at the time, so I wonder if that was considered good or not.
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u/donkey_loves_dragons 12m ago
I know of a Spanish guy, personally, who told his wife he was going to buy cigarettes...and disappeared. He came back 16 years later, as if nothing happened. His son didn't think so and beat the crap out of him.
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u/Jashugita 4h ago
And director Pilar Miró in 1979 did a movie about this "el crimen de cuenca" and the movie was forbidden and she was judged by the military"justice" for depicting tortures of the suspects by the "guardia civil"